48 Literary Terms Quotes
Following is our list of literary terms quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about .
Famous Literary Terms Quotes
One thing that literature would be greatly the better for Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and>metaphor. — Ogden Nash
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions. — Iris Murdoch
Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt. — Henry James
Literature is the question minus the answer. — Roland Barthes
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. — Ezra Pound
Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture. — Juan Ramon Jimenez
A Christian philosophy of literature begins with the same agenda of issues that any philosophy of literature addresses. Its distinctive feature is that it relates these issues to the Christian faith. — Leland Ryken
It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience. — Robert Morgan
While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living. — Cyril Connolly
Literature is air, and Im suffocating in mediocrity. — Armand Assante
The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. — Jose Saramago
Literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness. — F. R. Leavis
Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being. — Paul De Man
A literary work can only be received through symbols, through concepts - for that is what words are; but cinema, like music, allows for utterly direct, emotional, sensuous perception of the work. — Andrei Tarkovsky
Literary Devices Quotes
It is interesting to note that poetry, a literary device whose very construct involves the use of words, is itself the word of choice by persons grasping to describe something so beautiful it is marvelously ineffable. — Vanna Bonta
HASH: There is no definition for this word - nobody knows what hash is. — Ambrose Bierce
The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything — Aldous Huxley
Dictionary: a malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic — Ambrose Bierce
Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality. — Ursula K. Le Guin
Hash, x. There is no definition for this word - nobody knows what hash is. Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable. Dictionary, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work. — Ambrose Bierce
Synesthesia has interested me for a long time, both as a literary device and as a puncturing of the membranes that organize how the world comes into someone's head. — Leni Zumas
I should say that I'm not conscious of any particular style or any particular literary device when I am writing. I have written 22 books, and they are all very different. I have tried all kinds of genres. — Isabel Allende
People Writing About Literary Terms
| Name | Quotes | Likes |
|---|---|---|
 Ogden Nash |
210 | 1738 |
 Iris Murdoch |
183 | 962 |
 Henry James |
251 | 1241 |
 Roland Barthes |
154 | 943 |
 Ezra Pound |
226 | 1759 |
 Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
334 | 3608 |
More Literary Terms Quotes
So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter. — Donna Tartt
I believe my publisher has shown a great deal of faith in me over a lot of years but I'm not prepared to be so arrogant to say that the long-term literary value of my work would compensate them for a financial failure. — Andrew Vachss
I cannot stand Tolstoy, and reading him was the most boring literary duty I ever had to perform, his philosophy and his sense of life are not merely mistaken, but evil, and yet, from a purely literary viewpoint, on his own terms, I have to evaluate him as a good writer. — Ayn Rand
There is a technical, literary term for those who mistake the opinions and beliefs of characters in a novel for those of the author. The term is 'idiot'. — Larry Niven
The extraordinarily facile and in literary terms long lived works tend to be about ordinary people. Even Sappho writes about the utterly insignificant . What art can do is make the extraordinary more ordinary and ordinary more extraordinary. — Robert Dessaix
I think men can really get in the way when you are trying to sort your life out and get on with it. Because they just take up so much space. I'm not under any illusions that I could have been where I am now in literary terms if I had been heterosexual. I really believe I would not be. — Jeanette Winterson
Today, there are more opportunities for writers in terms of access to larger success, but it's more difficult to publish a literary novel in the lower ranges. In other words, you almost have to hit a home run. You can hit a triple, maybe, but nobody's interested in a single. — James Lee Burke
People aren't used to thinking of cultural forms spreading out across the full range of formal interactions - or what is called the "text" in literary terms. — Tony Conrad
During half a century of literary work, I have endeavoured to introduce the philosophy of evolution into the sphere of literature, and to inspire my readers to think in evolutionary terms. — Johannes Vilhelm Jensen
The better a novel is, in literary terms, the more you can't be faithful. The novel succeeds on terms exclusive to literature. A good film succeeds on terms exclusive to the cinema. That's why so many bad novels can become good movies. — Alexander Payne
Most of us do know we have no immortality. And when you've found a genius, someone who has already purchased his immortality in musical or literary terms, it's maddening. — Dan Simmons
I always thought that I could write a novel. In my case, it was misguided. I do believe that the best nonfiction is not "literary journalism," a misleading term, but rather journalism that asks the questions that serious literature asks. It's storytelling that happens to be true. So I don't think it was a missed opportunity. After awhile you learn what you're really good at. Life is short, so spend time doing that. — Ron Rosenbaum
For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication. — Karen Russell
Most of my formal choices are a combination of everything I learned about form - semiotics, linguistics, and the history of style experimentations tethered to literary movements (formalism, deconstruction, modernism, and postmodernism), and the basic principal of breaking every rule I ever learned from a patriarchal writing tradition that never included my body or experience, and thus has nothing to offer me in terms of representation. — Lidia Yuknavitch
Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable. — Julian Barnes
I don't think comics necessarily think in literary terms. There is an element of developing your stage persona and your comedic voice, but I don't think comics see it like a character in a novel. — Ted Alexandro
I had to learn the image is not the word, which is a jolt for a literary soul. But it has served me well in terms of understanding plot, in terms of watching actors develop characters. — Rita Mae Brown
Metaphor is not, and never has been, a mere literary term. It is an event. — Mary Ruefle
There are in me, in literary terms, two distinct characters: one who is taken with roaring, with lyricism, with soaring aloft, with all the sonorities of phrase and summits of thought; and the other who digs and scratches for truth all he can, who is as interested in the little facts as the big ones, who would like to make you feel materially the things he reproduces. — Gustave Flaubert
Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure. — Terry Eagleton
The word "God" is used in most cases as by no means a term of science or exact knowledge, but a term of poetry and eloquence, a term thrown out, so to speak, as a not fully grasped object of the speaker's consciousness -- a literary term, in short; and mankind mean different things by it as their consciousness differs. — Matthew Arnold
During half a century of literary work, I have endeavoured to introduce the philosophy of evolution into the sphere of literature, and to inspire my readers to think in evolutionary terms. — Johannes V. Jensen
I have studiously tried to avoid ever using the word 'madness' to describe my condition. Now and again, the word slips out, but I hate it. 'Madness' is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression. — Elizabeth Wurtzel
So it may well be believed that when I found him taking a complete holiday, with a vast supply of books at command, he had the air of indulging in a literary debauch, if the term may be applied to so honorable an occupation. — Marcus Tullius Cicero
I don't think in terms of that bizarre tautology 'value for money' in my literary and journalistic work - and nor will I in my academic role. However, if I don't believe I'm helping my students towards a fuller and more empowering relationship with the world, then I'll resign. — Will Self
In Conclusion
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